Today, an enterprise's survival in local or global markets at least partially depends on the knowledge and competencies of its employees, which may easily be considered a competitive factor for the enterprises (or other organizations). Shorter product life cycles and the speed with which the enterprise can react to changing market requirements are often important factors in competition and ones that underline the importance of being able to convey information on products and services to employees as swiftly as possible. Moreover, enterprise globalization and the resulting international competitive pressure are making rapid global knowledge transfer even more significant. Thus, enterprises are often faced with the challenge of lifelong learning to train a (perhaps globally) distributed workforce, update partners and suppliers about new products and developments, educate apprentices or new hires, or set up new markets. In other words, efficient and targeted learning is a challenge that learners, employees, and employers are equally faced with. But traditional classroom training typically ties up time and resources, takes employees away from their day-to-day tasks, and drives up expenses.
Accordingly, the enterprise may implement an electronic learning management system. The presentation of the user interface may be via a web browser (or other network-based application). Typically, there is no constant connection between the user interface and the server application because of the use of connectionless protocols. In this case, when a learner starts an example learning courses, the web server creates a server side session that holds the context information. While working through the learning content, the learner often clicks on a user interface element that triggers browser-server communication, which updates the server side session. But if no client-server communication occurs for a particular time span (usually 30 minutes) the server side session is terminated and the context removed. Occasionally, users that are still using the user interface may not be informed of this session removal and, therefore, may believe that they are still accessing a running or existing session. When this happens, the particular user must do something that triggers browser-server communication to indicate session time out error. Returning to the example electronic learning courses, certain activities (such as taking tests, reading content, etc.) may easily take longer than the server time out allows. In this case, the activity (test) results are lost because of the loss of server side context information.